Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote & The Programmer's Apprentice

["Peter J. Wasilko, Esq." <address@hidden>]

> In fact, inefficiency is good because programmer
> time is cheaper than computer time or computer power.

Greetings All,

    I think Eli meant to say that inefficiency is good because computer time is cheaper than programmer time.

    If we have a really compute intensive task, we can tap into the emerging Grid infrastructure to draw computer time from shared resources. But if we don't have a good programmer to write the code, all the CPU cycles in the world won't do us any good.

    In the next 100 years the dominant issue will not be how to make programs more efficient, but rather how to make the programmer (and the End User programmer in particular) more efficient.

    This shift in mind set is vital not just to solve all the simple problems we don't have the budget to hire someone to code a solution for, but also to address the devastating impact of software bugs that stem from legacy languages whose abstractions all but invite the introduction of buffer overflows and the like.

    While on the topic of trading CPU cycles for more effective programming, does anyone know whatever became of Charles Rich and Howard E. Shrobe's Programmer's Apprentice project at the MIT AI Lab circa 1977?

Warmest Regards,

Peter



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Peter J. Wasilko, Esq.
     J.D., LL.M.               

Executive Director, The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

Visit us on the web at: http://www.ieuc.org
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Its time to abandon brittle architectures with poorly factored
interfaces, gratuitous complexity, and kludged designs dominated
by sacrifices on the altar of backwards compatibility.

Such artifacts are vulnerable to cyber-attack, weigh down the
economy costing trillions of dollars in lost productivity, and
suffer from an impoverished conceptual model that lacks the
integration and elegance needed to empower end users to
get the most from advanced applications in the future.

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The Institute for End User Computing --- Pursuing Secure, Simple, 
   Supple, & Sophisticated Systems to Unlock Our Human Potential
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